Over the past couple of months
it has been quite noticeable that the amount of time and effort that is going
into website promotion is rapidly rising and therefore so is the associated
cost of keeping ahead of the competition.
More and more people are
devoting more and more time to website promotion and it is becoming a feature
of nearly all website promotion campaigns that they are embracing all known
search engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively relying on one or two
methods.
What we are seeing at the moment
is a landshift change in promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was
thought enough for a search engine optimization company to optimize the pages
(on page optimization) and submit the website.
However now that the competition
is becoming ever fiercer off page optimization is becoming a necessary
requirement of any respectable website promotion campaign.
Let's examine these two terms
and see what we mean my "on page optimization" and "off page
optimization".
On page optimization is the
process of tuning the page for a search engine or more usually trying to make
it rank highly on a selection of search engines. It's no wonder that many
search engine optimization engineers focus on Google exclusively as it
certainly produces the most traffic of all engines, but will that always be the
case? Things can change quickly in internet land.
Page optimization strategies
generally consist of using your keyword or keyword phrases in all of the pages
known "hotspots". The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt
tags, first heading and the body text. Subsequent "tweaks" can include
bolding the keyword phrase, using the keyword phrase in a hyperlink and more.
To a point there is only so much
that you can do to search engineer a page before it starts to look spammy,
repeating the keyword phrase over and over. Of course some
"optimizers" still do this but it's quickly becoming a frowned upon
practice as it detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a
professional image, not to mention your chances of being banned from the search
engine altogether.
This is where "off page
optimization" takes over.
Both Google and Yahoo use a
system of "ranking" websites dependent on several factors - one of
which is how relevant the content appears to be to the key phrase searched for
(on page optimization).
The second important criteria
that your pages are judged on is how "popular" those pages are in
comparison with your competition. Broken down into it's basest form it means
that the more quality votes (links) that your page has then the more popular it
must be and so is promoted higher up the search engine results. In Google
parlance this feature is known as "pagerank" and pagerank is a
vitally important part of your website promotion campaign. If you don't have
any then you are standing naked in front of everybody and that's not a nice
feeling!
Google pagerank is based on a
scale of 1-10 where 10 has the most influence. The algorithm is configured on a
sliding scale so that you only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of the full
amount. As those with the highest pagerank are constantly adding more
"votes" for their pages it makes sense that those at the bottom end
of the scale are going to have to work ever harder to play "catch up"
and that is where the extra cost is being factored in to website promotion
campaigns.
However it becomes more
complicated.
Not all links are equal.
Blindly rushing off and trying
to get as many links as possible is not going to help you much. In fact it's
one of the reasons why people are spending so much time and effort in their
link exchange campaigns and finding they are getting nowhere.
Savvy online marketers have
established that links from pages with a low pagerank are not as valuable as
links from those with a higher pagerank. But also in paradox to this it is
possible to get more value from linking to a page with lower pagerank than the
higher one!
Confused! No wonder "off
page optimization" is becoming such a sought after area of expertise.
The paradox occurs because built
into the pagerank algorithm is a method of transferring the amount of pagerank
"boost" a page gets by dividing up the total pagerank of a page by
the number of links present. So a high pagerank page with 100 links on it is
not going to give as much "voting power" as a low pagerank page with
only one or two links on it.
Trying to make sense of this is
at the heart of any "off page optimization" campaign. Sifting through
links, setting up reciprocal link campaigns (the site you link to links back to
you) getting links from directories and so on is a time consuming task, even
when using some of the more advanced tools that take a lot of the manual
drudgery out of the job.
Link exchanges are springing up
all over the place offering to bring together people willing to exchange links
and the humble text link is becoming one of the most valuable pieces of
internet property. Costs for placing text links on higher ranked sites are
escalating and it's becoming ever more important to network closely with other
sites offering useful services to your visitors.
Throwing up a links page and
asking all and sundry to link to it is not going to work - all that's going to
do is give you an administrative headache and make your visitors wonder if they
are making the right choice. Choosing quality link partners is a time consuming
and therefore expensive business.
What this all means is that the
cost of website promotion is constantly going up. And those companies with well
networked sites and strategically placed links are in a much better position to
help their customers than those who rely solely on pay per click campaigns and
other expensive forms of advertising.
A website promotion campaign is
still the best value for money form of advertising that there is in my opinion,
it's just that the costs are rising and will continue to rise. But the rewards
for those that get it right are greater in comparison.
To sum up, search engine
optimization is becoming a more and more labor intensive exercise. There are
more pages to be made search engine friendly and to gain top spots each page
has to be tuned for a particular search engine. Gone are the days of "one
size fits all".
In addition there is a large
amount of work involved in linking strategies and building the
"popularity" of a website so that it has a chance of making it into
the top 10 results.
It's this combination of work
required that is forcing up the costs of a search engine optimization campaign.
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Source: ezinearticles.com
